Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (47 page)

The Blizhnyaya, initially modest in size, had been built in 1934 by the architect Miron Merzhanov (arrested in 1943, released after his client’s death) and surrounded with thick, trucked-in trees. The nature-loving Generalissimo took special interest in the planting of
beliye
(porcini) mushroom patches; in our harsh northern climate the heroic dacha gardeners even raised watermelons, which were sometimes sold to unsuspecting shoppers at the opulent Yeliseevsky food emporium on Gorky Street.

Churchill, Mao, and Tito all slept on the second floor added in 1943. Their ever-paranoid host, though, hardly ever used a bedroom. He’d doze off on one of the hard Turkish couches scattered about; on one such, on March 1, 1953, he suffered his fatal stroke.

A few years earlier, too, journalists were given an unprecedented tour of the secret green house. There were hints the dacha was being declassified; in Moscow now I hoped to pull some journalistic strings and at last penetrate that tall fence in the forest, behind which lay the presence that haunted my most impressionable childhood. With Barry and Mom along, I intended a little reconnaissance.

The pine trees seemed less majestic than I remembered. Along muddy paths, yummy mommies in skinny jeans and stilettos pushed strollers; vigorous pensioners speed-walked by, arm in arm. There it loomed at last: the dacha’s fence. Two blond young guards in uniform stood by a side entrance, smoking. Unsmiling.

“The dacha … um … er … Stalin?” I mumbled.

“Classified object,” I was informed. “No questions permitted.”

As if drawn by an inner force, I led us away to another, much lower fence. Beyond it, through evergreens, I could make out a low pale-brick building—my old kindergarten, where I gagged on
nomenklatura
caviar and sucked in ecstasy on the
ananas
candy. The sight of my former prison catapulted me back to my sad-eyed bulimic past with such violence that I clutched onto a sticky pine trunk, desperately gulping the resinous air. The madeleine had attacked.

I pulled myself together and we left the woods. A deluxe apartment complex towered ahead, gleaming and shiplike.
STALIN
’
S DACHA
announced the sign on the inevitable fence.
APARTMENTS FOR SALE BY INVESTORS
.

“People don’t mind living in a building named after Stalin?” I asked an Uzbek guard, a fresh ripple of nausea stirring.

“Why?” He grinned. “I’m sure they’re proud.”

“How about a Molotov tennis court?” Barry asked, after we translated. “Or a Beria swimming pool?”

“Beria?” puzzled the guard, catching the name. He looked confused.

We hurried off, late now to Masha’s, and promptly got lost among Davydkovo’s identical five-story sixties-era apartment blocks. The cracked concrete walls and laundry flapping from rickety balconies were depressing and slumlike, all too familiar. But no, this was Moscow 2011: Barry had to stop, several times, to fasten his tourist lens on a Maserati parked by a rusted fence or an overflowing hulk of graffiti-scrawled garbage bins.

We recovered a little around Masha’s table. After dinner she took me into the bedroom and began pulling out small cardboard boxes from drawers and closets. I reached into one box and felt the cold metal heft of my grandfather’s medals. Masha and I tipped the whole treasure onto the bed. Order of Lenin, of Victory, of the Red Banner. Just as we had decades ago, we pinned the medals to our chests and danced a little in front of the mirror. Then we sat on the bed, holding hands.

The following noon I plucked a grape from a ruby-red crystal pedestaled bowl, cranked a heavily lipsticked smile for the cameras, and thought a monstrous thought: one of history’s bloodiest dictators likely touched this bowl I’m eating from.

Him
again.

No, I hadn’t slid into obsessional fantasy. I was on my TV shoot, an hour from Moscow at the super-bourgeois dacha of Viktor Belyaev, ex–Kremlin chef and my show partner.

Until a heart attack a few years before, Viktor had spent three high-stress decades cooking for the top Soviet hierarchy. From this lofty gig he’d inherited porcelain manufactured exclusively for Kremlin banquets, and a red crystal bowl set named Rubinovy (ruby, after the Kremlin star). The crystal’s former owner? The mustachioed one himself. More astounding still, the bowls had come from the dacha—
that
green dacha. Date of issue: 1949, Stalin’s seventieth jubilee year, celebrated so joyously, the entire Pushkin Museum of Art was commandeered as a giant display case for gifts to Dear Leader.

Viktor was disarmingly friendly and compulsively talkative. When Dasha the producer had originally said “Kremlin chef,” I imagined a dour Party hack with a heavy KGB past. Instead, in his baby-blue cashmere sweater and discreet gold neck chain, Viktor suggested a relaxed clone of Louis Prima, the jazz man; he had a very jazzy Chevy Camaro parked in his driveway.

Bonding with him pre-shoot over a quick cigarette out on the porch, I was amazed to learn that Viktor had cooked at
the
dacha in 1991, right before Gorbachev’s resignation. The mineral secretary had a residence on Blizhnyaya’s grounds, which he never used and wanted to convert into a small hotel—for international
biznes
VIPs. Viktor was brought in to handle the food operation and do some catering in the main house.

“Gorbach,”
huffed Viktor. “Nobody’s favorite boss! Half my staff quit because of Raisa—that harpy-from-hell, our First Lady. Now, Brezhnev’s wife
—she
was
golden.
”

“Viktor,” I pressed. “Please—the dacha!”

Viktor shuddered theatrically, fingered his gold chain. “Horrifying musty smell of sinister history … moats and drawbridges everywhere … some of the pine trees even hollowed out with doors and windows—for guards!” Because the Generalissimo detested all food smells, a massive three-hundred-yard corridor separated Blizhnyaya’s dining room from the kitchen. “And his closet …” Viktor grimaced. “I knew Stalin was short, but his clothes … 
they were for a child—or a midget.
”

Viktor initially learned about the forbidding green dacha from his elderly mentor, a certain Vitaly Alexeevich (last name strictly secret), formerly one of Stalin’s personal chefs. On March 6, 1953, Vitaly Alexeevich dutifully reported for his shift. He was met on the dacha porch by Valechka, the Generalissimo’s loyal housekeeper and, possibly, mistress. She had a car waiting for him.

“Flee,” Valechka told him. “Now! Drive as far as you can. Disappear!!” Stalin’s death had just been announced.

The chef ran, while other dacha staffers perished at Beria’s orders. He returned to Moscow the day of Beria’s execution, and for the rest of his life laid flowers on the housekeeper’s grave.

“Vitaly Alexeevich was a cook
ot boga
(God’s talent),” sighed Viktor. “He’d sing to his dough to help it to rise.” I thought of Mom’s and my struggles to crack the mysteries of Slavic yeast dough for our kulebiaka. Crooning to it, as Stalin’s chef had done—was that the secret?

“So was it
really
haunted, the dacha?” I wanted to know, thinking of all the times I slinked past the green fence during kindergarten, my heart hammering.

Viktor shuddered again.

At the end of his first night catering at Blizhnyaya, he was sitting alone in Stalin’s old dining room. He leaned on the massively long wooden table, the one at which murderous Politburo men gathered for their nocturnal banquets four decades before. An eerie silence.… Suddenly Viktor heard footsteps … footsteps so ghostly, he bolted into the woods drenched in cold sweat. The same thing happened to the actor who played Stalin during a 1991 film shoot there. And when Stalin’s
old dacha guard was invited back for a documentary, he suffered a heart attack.
“His
boot leather—” stammered the guard at the hospital. “I smelled it—his boot leather and the Karelian birch of
his
furniture!”

At this point we were summoned back inside. The TV cameras were ready for us.

The sight of Viktor’s table almost gave me a heart attack myself.

For our shoot—on
Soviet
cuisine—my partner had conjured up a Technicolor fantasia out of
The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food
—Politburo dreambook edition. Dainty, open-faced
rasstegai
fish pies nestled inside Stalinist crystal; an elaborate beef roulade layered with a delicate omelet reposed on a Kremlin-issue porcelain platter. There was even a torte outfitted with caramel rockets, contributed by a generous
ex-nomenklatura
confectioner.
Polyot
(“flight”), the torte was called: a meringue relic from the sixties
kosmos-
mania era.

I stared transfixed at this culinary time capsule. At the jellied ham rolls under mayonnaise curlicues, in particular. Early September, 1974: Praga restaurant take-out shop. Me standing—for the very last time, I thought—in the gigantic line for our Sunday kulebiaka as Mom at home irons out final immigration formalities. I’m eyeing the jellied curlicued ham rolls my parents couldn’t ever afford, thinking desperately:
Never in my life will I see them again
.

And now I learn that pre-Kremlin, Viktor cooked at Praga!

My
Praga.

Was there some profound meaning in all this coincidence? Had some god of Soviet Civilization sent Viktor my way to help me properly savor my childhood’s treasures and reveal its mysteries?

Arriving in Moscow this trip I’d been crestfallen to learn that my Praga was closed. One of the city’s last pre-Soviet great restaurants had been bought by the Italian designer Roberto Cavalli, to be converted, no doubt, into a post-bling elite playground. Seeing its iconic yellow facade disfigured by scaffolding at the head of Novy Arbat, I felt as if some dear old grandparent had died.

Viktor and I mourned the closure of Praga as the cameras rolled. “A-plus,” hooted our young director. “I’m loving you guys’ chemistry!”
Feeling relaxed at last, I prattled on about stalking diplomats by Praga’s entrance and hawking Juicy Fruit gum at school. The mostly youthful, post-Soviet crew lapped up my socialist misadventures.

“More! More stories like this!” they cried.

When Dasha had originally suggested a show on Soviet cuisine—“The topic is
hot
”—I’d been bewildered.

“But isn’t Moscow full of people who remember the USSR a lot better than I do? I mean, I’m from New York!”

“You don’t understand,” said Dasha. “Here we have mishmash for our memory. But an émigré like you—
you
remember things clearly!”

After the lunch, and before the
shashlik
(kebab) grill shoot by his dacha backyard swimming pool, Viktor clued me in on his time at the Kremlin kitchens.

Supplies were from their very own teeming farms. So damn rich was Politburo milk, truckers would loosely set deep metal lids on the milk buckets, and by arrival the clattering lids had churned up gorgeous thick, sticky cream. For instant pilfering.

I was astonished. “You mean despite all the perks—elite housing, Crimean resorts, special tailors—Kremlin employees
still
stole?”

“And how!” chuckled Viktor. Soon after taking over he raided his employees’ lockers and turned up sixty kilos of loot.
“And that was before noon.”

There beneath the twenty-five-foot ceiling of the main old Kremlin kitchen he made other discoveries too:

“Ready for the poolside shashlik!” announced the director.

After we wrapped and the crew headed home, I sat around with Viktor and his wife, eating leftovers. I was dazed by what I’d learned at his fantasy table. It was akin to discovering that Santa Claus was somehow, after all, real. The Soviet myth of plenty that my latter-Soviet generation had scoffed at? That fabled abundance so cynically, even existentially scorned?

How spectacularly it had flourished on Kremlin banquet tables.

The Politburo loved to stun foreign guests with Soviet opulence. Train convoys from all over the empire carried sausage from the Ukraine in porcelain tubs, lavish fruit from Crimea, dairy from the Baltic republics, brandies from Dagestan. Seven pounds of food per person was the official banquet norm. Black caviar glistened in crystal bowls atop “Kremlin walls” carved from ice tinted with red beet juice. Lambs were boiled whole, then deep-fried; suckling pigs sported mayonnaise show ribbons and olives for eyes. Massive sturgeons reclined majestically on spotlighted aquarium pedestals aflutter with tiny live fish. Outside,
we
queued up for wrinkled Moroccan oranges in subzero winters; inside the Kremlin, there were passionfruit, kiwis, and, as Viktor put it tenderly, “adorable
baby-bananchiki.
”

“Just imagine,” waxed Viktor. “The colorful lights at Georgievsky Hall in the Grand Palace are finally lit, the Soviet anthem starts up, everyone’s awestruck by all that glimmering china and glittering crystal …”